Lost Ratings ; Export/Import Ratings

[Ash Roarshock]

Super mad. I Updated. Then was looking through my playlists and noticed my ratings were all gone. I even have one giant playlist with every single song on it so I could export to SD card and keep the ratings backed up. I Exported and opened it on the PC, and all the ratings were reset to 0. I lost thousands of ratings AGAIN. How that could happen? I don't know and i wish I would have thought to change the folder of the last saved export so it didn't overwrite one that might have had most of the ratings, but there's nothing I can do now and for sure this is garbage not being able to read the embedded ratings. There should at least be an option to "import all ratings from embedded files". One click of a button could scan my 14,000 song library and get all of my embedded ratings. Then I could decide whether or not I manage them in Poweramp and export backups to keep them or continue to update the embedded ratings using a PC. I spent weeks of free time trying to manually add them in Poweramp only to lose them AGAIN before I even got halfway through. I mean, even if you remember to backup your settings regularly, what happens if your exported backup gets lost or corrupt? When I updated my from my last phone, I exported my settings and when I installed Poweramp on the new phone and tried to import the backup it crashed every time. That happens all the time going from really old to newer devices.

Edited December 24, 2021 by Ash Roarshock

[andrewilley]

@Ash Roarshock As you know, Poweramp does not read embedded ratings from audio files. Nor does it write to them.

So can I just check on this: you say that you did make a full backup of your ratings, via an exported Playlist containing all your library songs, just in case you ever had a problem with the integrity of the internal database? But then, when you actually did have a problem, you overwrote your vital backup file with the newly corrupted information (i.e. the zeroed ratings) instead of restoring from it? Unfortunately, if you have indeed wiped your own backup data - and you don't have a backup of your backup - there's not much that can be done.

One new feature introduced in build 912 is the ability to Backup or Restore ratings and/or most other database information using the new Export/Import Settings/Data feature. But even that would not protect you from erasing your own backup.

Andre

[Ash Roarshock]

2 hours ago, andrewilley said:

@Ash Roarshock As you know, Poweramp does not read embedded ratings from audio files. Nor does it write to them.

So can I just check on this: you say that you did make a full backup of your ratings, via an exported Playlist containing all your library songs, just in case you ever had a problem with the integrity of the internal database? But then, when you actually did have a problem, you overwrote your vital backup file with the newly corrupted information (i.e. the zeroed ratings) instead of restoring from it? Unfortunately, if you have indeed wiped your own backup data - and you don't have a backup of your backup - there's not much that can be done.

One new feature introduced in build 912 is the ability to Backup or Restore ratings and/or most other database information using the new Export/Import Settings/Data feature. But even that would not protect you from erasing your own backup.

Andre

I did a export of my playlists for my PC after the update a week or so ago and didn't notice it had wiped the ratings until today. If the answer is, you need to archive a backup of the backup in case a software glitch screws your library and your backup... there's something wrong.

I played around and found Poweramp isn't reading or writing to m3u playlists anymore. I re-imported some small playlists with ratings that I originally exported from Poweramp to share with my PC. Not one rating showed. I even created a brand new one on the pc and it won't show a rating. You have to manually set a rating in Poweramp and then export playlists to get it to write the new rating to a m3u file.

So now we've gone from not being able to import ratings from the song files to not being able to import from m3u's either. 

[andrewilley]

5 hours ago, Ash Roarshock said:

I did a export of my playlists for my PC after the update a week or so ago and didn't notice it had wiped the ratings until today.

1) If you make a backup of faulty, corrupted or missing data, you will end up with a faulty backup. So yes, you did break you own backup. Sorry, but there's nothing that can be done about that now, and the same would happen if you used the new Export/Backup Settings Data feature very regularly too. A backup of ratings (as they seem to be very important to you) is probably something you should keep safe where it can't be overwritten (even save it to a different device) or have a rotational backup plan. Long-term the solution would be for PA to write the rating back into the POPM tag in the original audio file 'on-the-fly' as soon as you make a change, but that has performance issues for playback (and also the potential to break poorly-encoded files) so Max has been reluctant to implement that.

2) PA no longer writes an M3U file back to storage just because you open it to view, it only writes to storage if you make a material change to a playlist (auto-writing was reported as a bug in https://forum.powerampapp.com/topic/21412-m3u-playlists-regularly-being-rewritten/ ). Simply changing the rating on some song which also happens to be contained in a playlist would not be considered worthy of forcing a rewrite - especially in your case as it would have broken your backup data immediately. However if you simply move a song up or down one position in a playlist then that would force a re-write of the list, so it's is pretty simple to achieve.

3) PA won't re-load a playlist (including loading ratings) unless the file has been changed, and it has never done that. The only exception to that would be in you perform a FULL Rescan which clears out old and possibly obsolete data and re-builds everything anew. I'm not 100% sure, but I doubt that the simpler Rescan/Resolve Playlists option would re-load ratings from an external M3U file unless there has been some material change to the file - i.e. ratings import is a one-shot thing only done when the playlist is first identified.

Andre

[Ash Roarshock]

3 hours ago, andrewilley said:

1) If you make a backup of faulty, corrupted or missing data, you will end up with a faulty backup. So yes, you did break you own backup. Sorry, but there's nothing that can be done about that now, and the same would happen if you used the new Export/Backup Settings Data feature very regularly too. A backup of ratings (as they seem to be very important to you) is probably something you should keep safe where it can't be overwritten (even save it to a different device) or have a rotational backup plan. Long-term the solution would be for PA to write the rating back into the POPM tag in the original audio file 'on-the-fly' as soon as you make a change, but that has performance issues for playback (and also the potential to break poorly-encoded files) so Max has been reluctant to implement that.

2) PA no longer writes an M3U file back to storage just because you open it to view, it only writes to storage if you make a material change to a playlist (auto-writing was reported as a bug in https://forum.powerampapp.com/topic/21412-m3u-playlists-regularly-being-rewritten/ ). Simply changing the rating on some song which also happens to be contained in a playlist would not be considered worthy of forcing a rewrite - especially in your case as it would have broken your backup data immediately. However if you simply move a song up or down one position in a playlist then that would force a re-write of the list, so it's is pretty simple to achieve.

3) PA won't re-load a playlist (including loading ratings) unless the file has been changed, and it has never done that. The only exception to that would be in you perform a FULL Rescan which clears out old and possibly obsolete data and re-builds everything anew. I'm not 100% sure, but I doubt that the simpler Rescan/Resolve Playlists option would re-load ratings from an external M3U file unless there has been some material change to the file - i.e. ratings import is a one-shot thing only done when the playlist is first identified.

Andre

1) The backup is a routine required on regular basis as a workaround for shortcomings of the app design. No one is going to be able to verify the app didn't break SOMETHING in between each backup if performed on a regular basis. The only option is to keep archived dated backups, so you can go back a version or two. All of that to maintain something that is embedded into individual files and folders and that could be written on the fly. I get that there is a scenario that the info could be corrupted in writing the rating to a file and why it hasn't been implemented out of that fear. But how about the scenario where EVERY SINGLE rating was corrupted due to the loss of ONE app setting, one dropped phone, one lost phone or even AN UPDATE.  DING DING DING. I'll take POSSIBILITY of 1 minor inconvenient corrupt file over ALL OF THEM being lost because the info for thousands is contained in one file. Most people manage their music on the PC/Mac and then transfer to their phone/device, so this is just an overwrite if a song gets corrupt. A minor inconvenience as a comparison.

2) That's all hearsay, being able to IMPORT ratings and images from the appropriate folders does not mean they have to be modified or overwritten. For some reason the concept of just being able to do a one-time scan and copy of the ratings from the embedded files in the library is overlooked. If you're moving your 10,000 song collection over to Poweramp, wouldn't you think a scan and import ratings from embedded files would be a pretty good option? Poweramp could then manage them from there on out, internally, just as it does now. That would solve 90% of the problem. Updating the actual embedded file is a very minor inconvenience compared to the latter..

3) You need to work on your people skills. You run half the people off on here with your robotic defensiveness, reiterating what someone just said or already knows and blaming them for everything. You come off very smug, always.

[flyingdutchman]

@Ash Roarshock for what it is worth, point 2 is exactly what my app music playlist manager does, reads ratings and times played from the popm tag and updates the Poweramp database. Any subsequent changes to ratings can be easily backed up to a simple text file (and restored too of course).

Although it has routines to write to the popm tag, restrictions in versions above android9 have broken this

[andrewilley]

@Ash Roarshock

1) At the risk of repeating myself again, I have already said that writing POPM data back to files would solve all your problems. But as you know, that is NOT a feature of Poweramp at present so that is a conversation for the Feature Requests forum. Any such decision is down to the dev, not me. And (again at the risk of repeating myself or sounding smug) if you unfortunately overwrote your backup with now-corrupted data, unless you also kept another copy of everything on another device (as @beat8000 sensibly suggests in his post) there's nothing much that can be done to recover it now. Sorry, but that's just a fact, I wish I could magically change it for you but I can't. In future, it would be a good idea to keep additional historical backups as they are not large and you could keep a whole folder full of them.

2) See @flyingdutchman's post above.

3) Do you find people stop bothering trying to help you when you talk to them that way? Insulting a site admin (or any user come to that) is not a great way to get your voice heard. 

Andre

[Ash Roarshock]

On 12/24/2021 at 6:37 PM, andrewilley said:

@Ash Roarshock

1) At the risk of repeating myself again, I have already said that writing POPM data back to files would solve all your problems. But as you know, that is NOT a feature of Poweramp at present so that is a conversation for the Feature Requests forum. Any such decision is down to the dev, not me. And (again at the risk of repeating myself or sounding smug) if you unfortunately overwrote your backup with now-corrupted data, unless you also kept another copy of everything on another device (as @beat8000 sensibly suggests in his post) there's nothing much that can be done to recover it now. Sorry, but that's just a fact, I wish I could magically change it for you but I can't. In future, it would be a good idea to keep additional historical backups as they are not large and you could keep a whole folder full of them.

2) See @flyingdutchman's post above.

3) Do you find people stop bothering trying to help you when you talk to them that way? Insulting a site admin (or any user come to that) is not a great way to get your voice heard. 

Andre

Sorry to everyone else for the frustration.

I do have a backup on my PC which I copy from my phone regularly when I transfer new music. Unfortunately it has been nearly a month since I last transferred anything and I listen to music 10 hours a day at work. So having an old backup on my PC will bring back some ratings, but I would estimate up to 3000 ratings have taken place since then. I only started adding ratings in Poweramp a few months ago to my 14,000* song library. I would need to make "historical" backups on my phone more regularly (nearly every working day) and move them to the cloud or something to prevent a significant loss. It seems that in the current state, it would be less work to just embed everything externally and avoid manually adding/changing ratings in Poweramp directly. 

I will have to give @flyingdutchman's app a try if it can update Poweramp's database directly from the embedded tag. I didn't know it could do that directly. That would be the best workaround.

 

[andrewilley]

@Ash Roarshock Yes, New Playlist Manager can read ratings directly from the POPM tags in your audio files and populate Poweramp's database with the results. Theo wrote his app to also be able to do the reverse (i.e. write the database ratings back into the relevant audio files) but Google's constantly changing storage access policies - especially in the latest versions of Android - prevent that from working without a lot of extra work and changing of development processes. 

I think most people are in agreement that Poweramp writing back to POPM tags as soon as you make a rating change would be the perfect solution from a user-interaction point of view, but that is something you'll need to convince @maxmp of, not me.

My own thought process on the subject (for what it's worth) would be that if a song is currently playing when you adjust its rating, PA could clone a temporary copy file, and then as soon as playback stops or another track commences, quickly delete the old audio file and rename the temp one. This would also be a good idea when editing other tags via the Info/Tags screen, which can currently cause issues if you try do it during playback (see https://forum.powerampapp.com/topic/22793-audio-glitches-and-skips-to-next-song-when-editing-tags/ ) . I would also like to see an optional tickbox in the Album Art screen to embed manually downloaded cover artwork directly into file tags too. 

In both cases, saving new tag contents could still potentially break poorly constructed files, but if you're prepared to take the risk by editing other tags I can't see why POPM should be much more dangerous. As I said, just my own thoughts, I don't know the full technicalities of the matter.

Andre

[Ash Roarshock]

On 12/25/2021 at 8:34 AM, andrewilley said:

Yes, New Playlist Manager can read ratings directly from the POPM tags in your audio files and populate Poweramp's database with the results.

I can't find any function in the app that actually does this? When i look at the playlists it has two fields attached to every song: "Rating (0-5)" and "Poweramp Rating (0-5)". It reads the existing embedded ratings, but the Poweramp ratings for every song are all set at 0. I can't find any settings to copy the rating over in the app. Using the app to send info to Poweramp doesn't change the rating unless I manually change the Poweramp rating in the playlist field also.

[andrewilley]

2 hours ago, Ash Roarshock said:

I can't find any function in the app that actually does this? 

You'd need to check this with the author of the New Playlist Manager app ( @flyingdutchman ) but as far as I'm aware NPM can read embedded ratings (i.e. POPM or equivalent tags) from the audio files in your collection and transfer those numbers directly over to the Poweramp library database:

 

I don't think NPM reads the ratings from Poweramp-Exported playlists though (as there's no need to, given that PA imports those itself), but I could be wrong about that. The only rating data that PA can export and import natively (apart from when using its new Backup file format) is the 0-5 info in the custom #EXT-X-RATING line.

I've moved this whole extended discussion into a thread of its own, as it's no longer related to a specific PA build and may otherwise become harder to find whenever the next PA build thread commences.

Andre

[Ash Roarshock]

I see why I couldn't find that as it only exists under the Poweramp tab and I don't have any playlists created in Poweramp. I went ahead and created a couple (one in Poweramp and one in the app), but it doesn't work. I get a notification "error due to permission restrictions". Then when I go to Poweramp I get the Poweramp has crashed error. 

Based on the reviews on the play store, it worked at some point with certain devices or versions of Android but lots of reviews reported for over a year now that they need to downgrade to an old version to get it to work.

I'm not going back that far. That puts me at square one.

 

[andrewilley]

Ratings are normally nothing to do with playlists (even though PA creates a customised entry via its playlist export system to include them, it's not a standard item and I doubt other apps would even see it).

The ability to scan rating tags from audio files and pass those star numbers to Poweramp's library database is a nice little extra that Theo added to his app. And it's not very hard to find; when you first open his app, tap the three-dots menu button and choose "Tags and Ratings". But he'll be able to provide you with more information I'm sure. I don't have enough files with embedded rating tags to be able to do any meaningful tests I'm afraid - or to be exact, having just checked, none at all.

Andre

[Ash Roarshock]

5 hours ago, andrewilley said:

Ratings are normally nothing to do with playlists (even though PA creates a customised entry via its playlist export system to include them, it's not a standard item and I doubt other apps would even see it).

The ability to scan rating tags from audio files and pass those star numbers to Poweramp's library database is a nice little extra that Theo added to his app. And it's not very hard to find; when you first open his app, tap the three-dots menu button and choose "Tags and Ratings". But he'll be able to provide you with more information I'm sure. I don't have enough files with embedded rating tags to be able to do any meaningful tests I'm afraid - or to be exact, having just checked, none at all.

Andre

I looked at simply creating playlists on the PC and then try to use the playlist manager to transfer them to Poweramp. The playlist manager app has no problem updating poweramps ratings if you already have an m3u with the #EXT-X-RATING: tag embedded. The problem I run into is I have 14,000+ library and all of the ratings are embedded in the audio file, not an m3u.

I actually spent some time yesterday looking for an app on the PC that will create playlists and add the #EXT-X-RATING: to the m3u using the embedded popm tag. I couldn't find anything. I could find apps that could make smart playlists using certain tags, but not actually embed the rating code into the m3u. I'm very surprised at how hard it is to find info on this. Winamp supposedly will do it, but only if you modify the rating in winamp.

I tried creating new playlists in the app suggested, but it doesn't appear to have the option to populate a Poweramp rating or rather copy the rating from the POPM rating when creating a new m3u. It seems that simple function would solve the problem as well.

Edited January 9, 2022 by Ash Roarshock

[flyingdutchman]

@Ash Roarshock Music Playlist Manager has no problem reading your ratings from a track as long as it is a) the popm tag that has the rating and b) it is ID3v2 . This routine is robust and will update the Poweramp database with the rating it finds.

The EXT-X-Rating in a playlist is proprietory to Poweramp so you will not find any other apps other than my music playlist manager where i have implemented this too

If you need more specific help, just send me an email

[andrewilley]

4 hours ago, Ash Roarshock said:

I looked at simply creating playlists on the PC and then try to use the playlist manager to transfer them to Poweramp.

If you just want to get ratings copied from your music files straight into Poweramp, please forget the red-herring of playlists. Ratings have nothing to do with playlists outside of PA's own customised creation mode, which won't work anywhere else.

Just make sure that your properly rated song files are on your phone, and use New Playlist Manager's 'ratings' feature (NOT its playlist features) to copy the rating data from each individual song file over to Poweramp's internal music database. That's it, no playlists needed.

Andre

[Senjar]

On 1/10/2022 at 1:21 AM, andrewilley said:

If you just want to get ratings copied from your music files straight into Poweramp, please forget the red-herring of playlists. Ratings have nothing to do with playlists outside of PA's own customised creation mode, which won't work anywhere else.

Just make sure that your properly rated song files are on your phone, and use New Playlist Manager's 'ratings' feature (NOT its playlist features) to copy the rating data from each individual song file over to Poweramp's internal music database. That's it, no playlists needed.

Andre

Hello, a few questions if you don't mind

Is this possible only on the paid version (paid version) or also on this one (free version) ? I can't find it on the free version.

On 1/9/2022 at 10:00 PM, flyingdutchman said:

@Ash Roarshock Music Playlist Manager has no problem reading your ratings from a track as long as it is a) the popm tag that has the rating and b) it is ID3v2 . This routine is robust and will update the Poweramp database with the rating it finds.

The EXT-X-Rating in a playlist is proprietory to Poweramp so you will not find any other apps other than my music playlist manager where i have implemented this too

If you need more specific help, just send me an email

Also what are the tags that the app can actually recognize?
Is it just "POPULARIMETER" , "RATING MM" and "RATING WMP"? Because I tried it with the "RATING" tag that foobar2000 uses and the app doesn't see any ratings.

Thanks

[flyingdutchman]

@Senjar Yes only in the paid version. It is disabled in the free version as nothing is really free is it?

and Yes, only Popularimeter tag (aka popm)

[Ash Roarshock]

It all sounds great to hear you guys talk about how it should work. As I said though, it doesn't work unless you downgrade to an old version of Poweramp. As confirmed by many reviews on the play store.

 

[maxmp]

@Ash Roarshock Poweramp can loose ratings for tracks when it looses information about tracks, which unfortunately may happen when Android update requires change of file access method (such as move from direct access to SAF API recently) or paths to files are forced to change by any other reason.

There are a few Poweramp options helping to move, store, backup, and restore ratings (prior build 912) and other track info (912+), but it requires additional actions from the user (exporting your playlists or a backup).

Unfortunately, keeping ratings in tracks is not an option for mobile app scenario, where process can be killed at any time even during active file work, and files can be large and on slow unreliable medium (sd cards). There are tracks and tag formats not supporting ratings at all. Also there are tracks with broken tags, broken inner structure which will become unplayable after tag editing (over years I got a collection of such tracks sent by users). There are tracks with huge embedded album art, files few hundred MBs and more in size, files with multiple tag formats all with a different info, tags with widely incorrect information, wrong headers, tracks with flac header but mp3 format and content, invalid content violating any possible spec out of there (good example is album art few dozens mb in size in a file format supporting maximum 1mb for an image).

Poweramp is able to play them and read their incorrect tags more or less, and even extract and show huge album art from them, but rewriting those in masse to write ratings unfortunately is not a solution for the app.

 

[andrewilley]

7 hours ago, Ash Roarshock said:

It all sounds great to hear you guys talk about how it should work

How what should work? Poweramp, or the third-party New Playlist Manager app? Please be specific as this thread has meandered a bit.

As Max has said, Poweramp treats ratings as database-created items only, and as such they are somewhat transient insofar as if the database is damaged or cleared, or the precise audio file details or locations get changed, any entries (which including ratings) will be lost. That's what the new backup feature is for, but you need to use it with care and keep a master copy safe somewhere that you are not going to overwrite with potentially inaccurate content if you do it as a daily process.
 

@maxmp Clearly Poweramp should not be attempting to become a universal batch tag editing solution, that is well beyond its remit and scope - and as you say, potential task killing would make it dangerous without creating a background process to handle it like New Playlist Manager seems to do. So mass writing of rating data to entire music collections is out, that should be left to more dedicated apps. However I can't see why writing an individual file is any more dangerous than using the existing Info/Tags tag editor feature? If a file format doesn't support tagging or is broken, surely that feature won't work either, yet it is still shown in the interface? For the vast majority of files with either ID3v2 ("POPM") or Vorbis ("RATING") tags, or even APEv2 or iTunes downloaded AAC files, then isn't it similarly as reliable (or unreliable) as the Info/tags editor?

Merely reading any existing rating info from source audio files during the full scan process ought to be a fairly trivial feature to add though, which would help a lot of users. Writing new ratings info back into files on-the-fly, as this thread requests, should certainly be something that the user is shown a pre-warning message about - either when that mode is first enabled in Settings, or when a problematic file format is noticed - so they are aware of the risks before proceeding. To protect against task killing during writing, I would suggest building a temporary copy of the file containing the new data first, and only once writing is verified as complete should the old file be removed and the new one instantly renamed to replace it. This is fairly standard practice for programs needing to safely update existing documents. Doing this would probably prevent most audio glitching if the user made a change during playback of the same file too, although this is something that is already permitted in the existing Info/Tags editor screen anyway.

Andre

[flyingdutchman]

10 hours ago, Ash Roarshock said:

It all sounds great to hear you guys talk about how it should work. As I said though, it doesn't work unless you downgrade to an old version of Poweramp. As confirmed by many reviews on the play store.

 

Some confusion here. the version of Poweramp is irrelevant

To be clear:

- you want to transfer the ratings of your mp3 (or flac) tracks (all properly tagged) to show in Poweramp

- my app Music Playlist Manager does that without any issues

- if you have any issues send me an email rather than using the forum for support on my app

[Senjar]

2 hours ago, andrewilley said:

How what should work? Poweramp, or the third-party New Playlist Manager app? Please be specific as this thread has meandered a bit.

As Max has said, Poweramp treats ratings as database-created items only, and as such they are somewhat transient insofar as if the database is damaged or cleared, or the precise audio file details or locations get changed, any entries (which including ratings) will be lost. That's what the new backup feature is for, but you need to use it with care and keep a master copy safe somewhere that you are not going to overwrite with potentially inaccurate content if you do it as a daily process.
 

@maxmp Clearly Poweramp should not be attempting to become a universal batch tag editing solution, that is well beyond its remit and scope - and as you say, potential task killing would make it dangerous without creating a background process to handle it like New Playlist Manager seems to do. So mass writing of rating data to entire music collections is out, that should be left to more dedicated apps. However I can't see why writing an individual file is any more dangerous than using the existing Info/Tags tag editor feature? If a file format doesn't support tagging or is broken, surely that feature won't work either, yet it is still shown in the interface? For the vast majority of files with either ID3v2 ("POPM") or Vorbis ("RATING") tags, or even APEv2 or iTunes downloaded AAC files, then isn't it similarly as reliable (or unreliable) as the Info/tags editor?

Merely reading any existing rating info from source audio files during the full scan process ought to be a fairly trivial feature to add though, which would help a lot of users. Writing new ratings info back into files on-the-fly, as this thread requests, should certainly be something that the user is shown a pre-warning message about - either when that mode is first enabled in Settings, or when a problematic file format is noticed - so they are aware of the risks before proceeding. To protect against task killing during writing, I would suggest building a temporary copy of the file containing the new data first, and only once writing is verified as complete should the old file be removed and the new one instantly renamed to replace it. This is fairly standard practice for programs needing to safely update existing documents. Doing this would probably prevent most audio glitching if the user made a change during playback of the same file too, although this is something that is already permitted in the existing Info/Tags editor screen anyway.

Andre

I agree and super fine with just read-only ratings. I can modify them on another app or PC.

[maxmp]

@andrewilley yes, some solutions are possible, which may work for 99% of cases, may be always backing up file prior to any change will cover the last 1% (but it’s super slow esp. on SAF forced devices).

Also writing tag to the tail of track (e.g. the APE tag) may help, though this won’t be compatible with any other players out of there and that won’t solve the issue with the invalid tags/album art in the original file.

The Info/Tags editing (vs just rating change) can be understood by user as file changing operation, requiring input from user, while rating change is one click.

[andrewilley]

Yes, any writing to files definitely needs to retain existing compatibility with the standard and also with other apps, agreed.

But if it takes a while to write, so be it - that's up to the user to decide whether the waiting time is worth it to them. It would only be single files at a time, and would only happen if the user opts for it.

I would suggest ratings should be auto-read during the next Full Rescan (but if existing different ratings already exist in a user's database, prompt the user before overwriting anything).

And when a user later changes any rating, another pop-up a box would appear (with a potential consequences warning) asking whether to write rating back to file: Always, Prompt Each Time, or Never.

Andre